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A jury must settle the defendant’s state of mind when Sgt. Ryan Russell was killed.

Christine Russell, wife of the slain police officer Sgt. Ryan Russell , is seen during a break outside the courthouse at 361 University Ave. Beside her is Mike McCormack, president of the Toronto Police Association. (RICHARD LAUTENS / TORONTO STAR)

Four taxis, a limousine, numerous private vehicles, a plate-glass window, a garbage truck, a police cruiser, an ETF officer and one tragically vulnerable street cop: Richard Kachkar hit them all.

It was a demolition derby with a snowplow on the blizzard-white morning of Jan. 12, 2011.

Sgt. Ryan Russell, 35-year-old married father to a young son, died of his grievous injuries — a fractured skull, blood spilling on the ground from his right temple.

He’d got off three defensive shots, none of them striking the windshield of the monster plow moving so deliberately toward him.

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Kachkar survived Tasering and two bullet wounds from the gun of another officer, indestructible and unyielding.

Monday morning, head bowed and never once looking up from the dock in a Toronto courtroom, Kachkar listened to a Crown attorney describe the bizarre events of that calamitous morning — a road map outline of evidence the jury is expected to hear over the course of a first-degree murder trial that is estimated to last two months. Ryan’s widow sat in the front row.

Kachkar has pleaded not guilty to murder and dangerous driving.

January, two years ago: From the driver’s seat of the stolen GMC truck with its front-end affixed snow shovel, having just crashed it through the display window of a luxury car dealership, Kachkar asked the concierge of a nearby building — the prosecution alleges — if the man wanted to take a ride, then screamed something about “Chinese technology.”

To a couple of women who work at a retirement home, the Crown claims, he asked if they were Chinese.

To a doctor on his way to Mount Sinai Hospital, Kachkar leaned out the window, swore, and purportedly hollered: “I am going to get you.”

To a team of paramedics racing toward the intersection for the officer-down call-out, snow plow proceeding in the opposite direction, Kachkar is said to have babbled about shots being fired and the Taliban.

To the ETF members who finally yanked Kachkar out of the halted truck in Toronto’s west end — one hour and 51 minutes after he’d commandeered the plow from outside a Tim Hortons, leading a cortège of pursuit vehicles across the city on a slow car chase — he allegedly made a comment about his sister being the reason for all this havoc, that it was her fault.

To a fellow resident at a St. Catharines shelter — this a fortnight earlier — Kachkar had wondered aloud, as the jury will hear: “Do you think if I do something bad, will God still love me or will I have to walk away from God?”

To a front-desk employee at the Good Shepherd Shelter on Queen St., in the early-evening hours of Jan. 11, he apparently spoke about wanting to call the RCMP because he thought he was going to do something bad.

All these details were included in the Crown’s opening, which of course isn’t evidence until it comes from a witness.

Kachkar changed his mind about the RCMP but a few hours later he left the shelter, leaving socks and shoes behind. At around 5 a.m., he was perched at the window in the Tim Hortons on Parliament and Cole Sts., as the jury saw on videotape. In a terrible confluence of happenstance, two snowplow operators had just stomped into the coffee shop to grab a snack. Daniel DaSilva had left the vehicle idling, keys in the ignition.

DaSilva, first witness called to the stand, noticed the dishevelled man with his bare feet, assumed he was a panhandler. “He was kind of staring at us.”

Suddenly, the man bolted for the exit, seemed to be making a beeline right for the plow directly out front. DaSilva and his partner gave chase — the episode captured by surveillance cameras — but weren’t able to catch the man before he jumped into the truck, put it in drive, which automatically locked the doors, and floored it, all four tires spinning as the vehicle lurched from the curb, northbound. It had a full tank of gas.

Kachkar drove first toward Avenue Rd., over the sidewalk and allegedly slammed through the glass front doors of a Maserati and Ferrari dealership. Cars were struck as he continued on his chaotic way, U-turning south, U-turning north, driving erratically in the wrong lanes

At 52 Division, Russell — former member of the gangs and guns task force, promoted to sergeant just a year before — heard about some kamikaze driver in a stolen snowplow. He got into scout car 52S2. It was just before 6 a.m.

He had some 40 minutes left to live.

The moment Russell activated his emergency roof light, the video equipment inside his car started rolling. That camera would document much — but not all — of what ensued.

Russell was waved down by one of the cabbies who had been side-swiped. “Is it about the snowplow?” Yes, they’d received many calls about that, said Russell, according to the prosecution, setting off in the direction the cabbie had indicated.

“The video will show that within six seconds of Sgt. Russell activating his lights, the snowplow started to brake and pull towards the east curb of Avenue Rd.,” Crown Attorney Christine McGoey told Ontario Superior Court Justice Ian MacDonnell and the jury. “It did not stop. Instead, Richard Kachkar did a U-turn, going counter-clockwise, and coming south in the northbound lanes. . . . There are six lanes available to him at that location on Avenue Rd. The plow drove directly toward Sgt. Russell’s marked police car.”

Russell stopped, reversed, got out of his car near Pears Ave. The Crown says Kachkar accelerated right at him, hitting the driver’s side corner, pushing it back. That’s when Russell drew his revolver and began firing. But the plow kept coming. The collision that crumpled Russell unconscious is out of video range.

The prosecution is arguing that when Kachkar drove toward the marked car, with its lights on, he knew Russell was a cop. “It is the Crown’s position that he meant to cause Ryan Russell’s death or to cause him bodily harm he knew was likely to cause his death and, in doing so. Richard Kachkar committed first-degree murder.”

Not until 7:11 a.m. did ETF manage to corral the plow on Keele St. and only after it had banged off a succession of other obstacles, as well as striking one of the officers, pinning his leg between the plow and a garbage truck. Injured, Kachkar sputtered weirdly about Facebook, the government and it all being part of a Russian video game, said McGoey.

There is no doubt, Justice MacDonnell told jurors right off the top, that Kachkar drove the truck which struck and killed Russell. The defendant’s state of mind that morning is the only real issue for the triers of fact to decide.

The 46-year-old merely stared intently at his hands.

But the emotional exhaustion of the day was writ on the face of Russell’s widow.

“The pain is back,” Christine Russell told reporters outside the courthouse, saying she’ll have more to say at trial’s end. “It’s not easy to sit so close to someone you know has done so much harm.”

Does he know it, though? And did he, back then?

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